Drawing towards the end of a great week in Norway. Highlight has to have been a fjord cruise yesterday, absolutely stunning scenery that I took a full memory card’s worth of pictures of. In general, it has involved wandering round a pretty little Norwegian town, and feeling rather relaxed. You can see all my photos (and there are a lot) here.

The latter emotion is despite giving up smoking, which thanks to patches has worked out alright thus far. This is stage two on the flotsky self-improvement front this year, stage one being my exemplary gym work thus far (N.B. exemplary equals going to in my personal dictionary).

So I decided to change the theme of this blog to something a little more, well, plain and befitting of my current mood for minimalism. I’ve moved to using the Compositio Theme for WordPress, which I like as a nice clean starting point. I’m hoping to firstly grey it up a little, then I might see about adding a few little extra things too. It also looks rather nice on the iPhone, and is legible even without zooming in (well just about, and I don’t have great eyesight).

I also received my Moo cards today, little rectangular business cards with an assortment of my own photographs from Flickr on them. Very please with the results. Only using them to have my blog and email-address on, and for vanity, rather than actual business.

I’m learning how to use my macro lens properly on my new camera. A macro lens will allow you to focus in very tightly on an object. To really get your photographs looking perfect takes quite a bit of knowledge of how to set them up properly. I’m getting there. It was quite late in the day, so I might try again slightly earlier tomorrow, and take advantage of a bit more light, which will help with the pictures. Many of my others were less than successful, so it is a matter of looking at the settings, learning, and trying again.

Well Luminox was utterly spectacular. Here in Oxford, they’ve closed off Broad Street for three days, and allowed some French artists to set up some huge displays of fire lanterns. There was a ball of fire and a chandelier of fire amongst others, some almost ambient music playing with a couple of great singers singing live over it, huge crowds, and mainly a lot of fire.

I went down tonight on my own to take pictures, along the way bumping into a couple of people from work doing the same thing (Hi Al!). I’m still very much getting used to my camera, so compared to some of the other pictures I’ve seen on Flickr thus far mine don’t look that great, but it was very good practice on that count. Our plan for Saturday is to take a couple of friends down who are visiting to see it. I got the impression that more might be happening later on in the evening, so I might get to see some different things then.

It was simple a wonderful thing to see, so many people enjoying something quite unusual, particularly for Oxford. I can’t wait to go again!